Sleep hygiene behaviours: an application of the theory of planned behaviour and the investigation of perceived autonomy support, past behaviour and response inhibition

This study investigated the sleep hygiene behaviour of university students within the framework of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB [Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179-211.]), and examined the predictive validity of additional variables including perceived autonomy support, past behaviour and response inhibition. A total of 257 undergraduate students from an Australian university were administered two online questionnaires at two time points. At time 1, participants completed the TPB questionnaire and the Go/NoGo task as a measure of response inhibition. A week later at time 2, participants completed a questionnaire measuring the performance of sleep hygiene behaviours. Multiple and hierarchical regression analyses showed that the TPB model significantly predicted intention and behaviour. Although intention and perceived behavioural control were statistically significant in predicting behaviour, past behaviour and response inhibition accounted for more variance when added to the TPB model. Subjective norm was found to be the strongest predictor of intention implying the importance of normative influences in sleep hygiene behaviours. Response inhibition was the strongest predictor of behaviour, reinforcing the argument that the performance of health protective behaviours requires self-regulatory ability. Therefore, interventions should be targeted at enhancing self-regulatory capacity.     

Positive Indicators of Child Well-Being: A Conceptual Framework, Measures, and Methodological Issues

This article suggests a comprehensive conceptual framework which identifies constructs for positive well-being as well as potential indicators and extant measures that fit with those constructs. In addition, the article reviews existing data sources for examples of positive measures that are found in the proposed framework as well as research studies that have been successful in measuring these indicators. The article then notes the data and measurement gaps that exist in comprehensively measuring the positive in children and youth. Finally, it identifies a number of conceptual and methodological issues that need consideration as efforts to define and measure positive indicators of well-being and well-becoming go forward. We argue that positive indicators represent good science, reflect and promote a positive vision of children, and establish positive goals for nations.     

In Search of Common Threads: Linking Multicultural,Feminist, and Social Justice Counseling Paradigms

Multicultural, feminist, and social justice counseling theories are often viewed as disparate helping models. This article examines the complementary nature of these models and discusses the need to promote a clearer understanding of the ways in which these common threads can be used in counseling practice.     

Evaluating the method of levels

An investigation of the method of levels (MOL) was undertaken. Based on the principles of perceptual control theory (PCT), MOL is a way of helping people to reduce psychological distress. MOL assumes that psychological distress results when people are unable to control experiences that are important to them. The approach was implemented over six months in a large urban GP practice. Patients attended for between one and six sessions. Patients who attended for more than one session demonstrated significant reductions in scores of symptomatology on a standardized questionnaire. Effect sizes of these differences were relatively large. There appeared to be no relationship between the number of sessions a patient attended and the amount of reduction in symptomatology that was recorded. Similarly, there was no relationship between the number of sessions a patient attended and their recorded level of symptomatology at their first appointment. Although the study has important limitations we suggest that these findings might offer new directions for future research and might provide a way of unifying the specific and common factors as well as understanding the Dodo Bird effect.     

The Relationship between Religiosity and Drug Use among “At Risk” Women

This study focuses on the interplay between religiosity and drug use in a sample of 250 adult women from the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area who were interviewed between August 1997 and August 2000. The research addresses two principal questions: (1) Is there a relationship between the level of religiosity and the amount of illegal drug use reported? (2) If so, is this relationship maintained in multivariate analysis when the effects of other potentially relevant factors like demographic characteristics, childhood maltreatment experiences, psychosocial traits, and substance user-related measures are taken into account? We found that religiosity is related to the amount of drugs women used. Four variables were retained in the final multivariate drug use prediction model: religiosity, coping with everyday stresses, number of family members who are substance abusers, and amount of oral sex. Greater amounts of drugs were used by women who were less religious, less capable of coping with stress, had more drug-abusing family members, and reported having more oral sex. Together, these items explained nearly one-fifth of the variance in the dependent variable. The implications for substance abuse prevention and intervention efforts are discussed.     

Zur Dynamik der Interaktion in der Supervision

The manifold functions of a supervisor in following the course of complex processes together with the trainee, are: ? to keep the goals of the supervision in view, ? to establish a teaching alliance and to support the wish and ambitions of the candidate to learn, ? to build a platform for the complex interactions with the trainee with regard to the dynamics of the training situation and keeping in mind the institutional influences, ? to lay down the setting for the work, ? to explore and to reflect how transference and counter-transference influence the interaction between patient and analyst as well as between trainee and supervisor, ? to examine these interactions together focussing continuously on the interaction between candidate and patient, and to encourage the candidate to do the same on his own, ? to continuously formulate hypotheses about the core conflict, the transference phenomena and resistance of the patient, ? to explore and reflect on the cooperative work.     

Promoting Systemic Change Through the ACA Advocacy Competencies

In 2003, the American Counseling Association (ACA) adopted the ACA Advocacy Competencies (J. A. Lewis, M. S. Arnold, R. House, & R. L. Toporek, 2002) to provide guidance to counselors and acknowledge advocacy as an ethical aspect of service to clients. This article provides a foundation for this special section by sharing a historical perspective on recent pivotal advocacy movements within the profession. An overview of the development and content of the Advocacy Competencies is provided followed by a case example to assist counselors in understanding and enhancing their application.     

Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex

One of the most intriguing findings on language comprehension is that violations of syntactic predictions can affect event-related potentials as early as 120 ms, in the same time-window as early sensory processing. This effect, the so-called early left-anterior negativity (ELAN), has been argued to reflect word category access and initial syntactic structure building (Friederici, 2002). In two experiments, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate whether (a) rapid word category identification relies on overt category-marking closed-class morphemes and (b) whether violations of word category predictions affect modality-specific sensory responses. Participants read sentences containing violations of word category predictions. Unexpected items varied in whether or not their word category was marked by an overt function morpheme. In Experiment 1, the amplitude of the visual evoked M100 component was increased for unexpected items, but only when word category was overtly marked by a function morpheme. Dipole modeling localized the generator of this effect to the occipital cortex. Experiment 2 replicated the main results of Experiment 1 and eliminated two non-morphology-related explanations of the M100 contrast we observed between targets containing overt category-marking and targets that lacked such morphology. Our results show that during reading, syntactically relevant cues in the input can affect activity in occipital regions at around 125 ms, a finding that may shed new light on the remarkable rapidity of language processing.